Painting on empty

May 17 2003

Food is a great theme in art, but hunger is more important.

Paul Gauguin was hungry. The painter, sculptor and self-appointed symbolist prophet arrived on the South Pacific paradise island of Tahiti in April 1891, sailing from France on a government mission to document the life and customs of what was, and still is, a French colony. He was crushingly disappointed to find the capital, Papeete, Westernised and seedy, so he set out into the forest. And there he was, living in a hut near the shore with a spectacular view of the volcanic island Moorea. Paradise at last. There was just one problem.

"Two days later I had run out of stores," he confesses in Noa Noa, his Tahitian journal. "I had thought that by paying I would be able to get all the food I required. Food was certainly to be found on the trees, in the mountains, in the sea, but one had to be able to climb the tall trees, go into the mountains and come back laden with heavy loads, know how to catch fish, to dive deep into the sea and wrench off the molluscs clinging to the rocks ... as I sadly considered my situation and my empty stomach, a native made signs and called out in the vernacular: 'Come and eat'."

It was his first encounter with the generosity of the Tahitians. Gauguin's 1891 painting The Meal, or Bananas, now in the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, glories in the honesty of this truly natural food: three boys sit before a table laden with fruit, a red and mustard sunburst of bananas still on the freshly cut branch, a bowl of what looks like coconut milk, a gourd containing water.

Gauguin had found the food he liked. He was luckier than Vincent van Gogh with whom, three years earlier, he had shared a studio in Arles, in Provence.

Van Gogh could never stop thinking about food, anxiously, blaming his emotional and health problems and those of his friends on poor diet; he was relieved to move from Paris to escape the capital's "foul wine" and "greasy steaks". He advocated a simple diet: every day, drink a little red wine, smoke a pipe, eat some bread and cheese. ");document.write("

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Unfortunately his life never was this ordered: when Gauguin arrived at van Gogh's Yellow House he was disgusted by the state of the kitchen.

When van Gogh had an attack of epilepsy, as it was diagnosed, while a patient in an asylum, he ate dirt. Stranger still, he ate paint.

Food is a great theme in art, but hunger is more important still. It was starvation, said the surrealist Joan Miro, that induced the visions he recorded in dream paintings such as The Birth of the World (1925), which depicts a cosmic or microscopic level of existence in which spermatozoic forms float in a primordial soup.

When he arrived in Paris from Catalonia in the 1920s, Miro could barely afford to eat. "I was living on a few dried figs a day. I was too proud to ask my colleagues for help. Hunger was a great source of hallucinations. I would sit for long periods looking at the bare walls of my studio trying to capture these shapes on paper or burlap."

The highest praise of a representational painting is that it looks good enough to eat. This was how, in one of the most influential discussions of painting, the ancient Roman writer Pliny the Elder praised the Greek painter Zeuxis. In a competition with his fellow painter Parrhasius, Zeuxis painted some grapes. His still life was so uncannily life-like that birds flew down and pecked at it. Parrhasius won the competition, painting a curtain that fooled Zeuxis himself. But it is the mouth-watering grapes that haunt the history of art.

Cravings rumble underneath the smooth surface of still-life painting. The giant strawberries on which naked revellers gorge in Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights are still-life painting made hallucinatory, and make you think of Miro's starvation apparitions. The funerary stele of Amenemhet, dating from about 2000BC and in the Cairo Museum, depicts a table laden with lovingly modelled foodstuffs.

This reveals some strange dialogue between food, famishing, desire and death going on at the deepest level of still-life representation: nature morte, as the French say. It's as if painted food is not something for the body but for the soul, not for us to eat but for the dead. The most famous meal in art, The Last Supper, is a leave-taking by a man about to die.

Yet if Italian Renaissance Last Suppers are meant to be nourishment for the soul, they keep spilling over into fantasies for the body - the bulging tables and mythic appetites of Pieter Bruegel's peasants, but this time with the table manners, waiters and civilised chat of elegant al fresco dining: pretty much what you would expect in an Italian restaurant today. Tintoretto's Last Supper (1592-94) has a woman scooping plates of shellfish antipasti out of a water-filled tub into which a cat greedily peers.

The 16th-century writer Aretino claims that stylish dining was an invention of Renaissance Florence. In a letter thanking a friend for a gift of salad, he declares that "the art of setting the table, decorating it with roses, washing the glasses, putting plums into pies, garnishing liver with herbs, making black puddings and serving fruit after the meal, all come from Florence. Those avid and diligent little Florentine brains were so subtle that they concocted all the ways in which cooking can tempt the jaded appetite."

Because of its continuing reliance on local, freshly caught foods, Italian cooking is closer than most to the images you see in historical art, right back to a zuppa di pesce in an ancient Roman mosaic in the Naples Archaeological Museum; this is why Italian food often looks like a piece of art on a plate. Because food in art has very little in common with the high art of food, with haute cuisine.

The founding text of haute cuisine, Jean Brillat-Savarin's La Physiologie du Gout, is a perverse classic of aesthetics, and chefs at this rarefied level are routinely compared to artists. Yet the elaborate inventions of modern urban cooking have never really inspired visual artists.

It must be because the fantasies of food indulged in by art have their origins in an ancient human obsession with multiplying a fragile pleasure, or commemorating a need, that art, even today, is really quite simple in its culinary tastes. The great images of food in art are all of unpretentious foods. Bread is the stuff of life and one of the most depicted foods. Beans are another. Annibale Carracci's The Bean-Eater (c1583-4) portrays a man in humble clothes eating hearty food, a big bowl of beans in a brown soup washed down with red wine. Salvador Dali called beans a "mealy and melancholy vegetable".

As Andy Warhol said, "Progress is very important in everything except food. When you say you want an orange, you don't want someone asking you 'an orange what?"' We think lazily of Warhol's cans as images of the mass-produced, but what is so modern about the soup they contain?

In the 1960s, in a society of unprecedented affluence, American artists were looking not for a cold satire on greed but for an emotional reconnection with the needs that drive us to eat. In what at first sight seems an art without historical precedent, the roots of foodie performance are right back in the gut of the Middle Ages: Carolee Schneemann's 1964 "happening" Meat Joy, in which performers smear their naked bodies with raw chickens and tease each other with mackerel, is a gross-out with the rich, full flavour of Bosch.

The American artist Paul McCarthy's ketchup and chocolate sauce performances, in which he plays a psychotic chef, again revert to the deep history of oral fantasy. This week, McCarthy will unveil a giant inflatable ketchup bottle, as if in an updated Garden of Earthly Delights, at London's Tate Modern.

The contemporary art of food, especially in America, often expresses the bulimic self-disgust of an indecently well-fed society. Yet the greatest images of food have been made out of a deficiency.

Picasso's still-lifes of the 1940s are some of the most powerful of all. During World War II he refused to follow the many artists who fled occupied France for the US, staying in Paris. There wasn't much food, and it was at that time that Picasso, driven by hunger and grief, painted masterpieces of carnivalesque oral rage. His 1941 Still Life with a Pigeon includes an unplucked pigeon that looks as if it has just been killed on a Paris rooftop.

Great art is not made on a full stomach: it is made out of need. Art is a hunger - for sustenance, for communication, for whatever it is we lack.